Dr. Allyson Hobbs

Her writing is elegant, bubbling with curiosity even as it is authoritative and revelatory.

— The San Francisco Chronicle

In narrating the lives of Americans at the border of whiteness, Hobbs illuminates our understanding of our country’s tortured race history and of the injustices that drove people to make the ultimate migration―out of the tyranny of enslavement and the terrors of Jim Crow to the costly privilege of the larger white world.

— Isabel Wilkerson, author of The Warmth Of Other Suns

By investigating the binary lives of the so-called ghosts that exist in American history, Hobbs raises important questions and ideas about race relations and the ‘lost’ histories of African American communities.

— Library Journal

Selected Lecture Topics

The Urgent Need for Historians in the Time of Trump

Far From Sanctuary: African American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights

A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life

From Freedom to Freedom Now: African American History, 1865-Present

On the Road: Reimagining the American Road Trip in Twentieth-Century America

Allyson’s first book, A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life, published by Harvard University Press in 2014, examines the phenomenon of racial passing in the United States from the late eighteenth century to the present. A Chosen Exile won two prizes from the Organization of American Historians: the Frederick Jackson Turner Prize for best first book in American history and the Lawrence Levine Prize for best book in American cultural history.

“Hobbs provides fresh analysis of an oft-ignored phenomenon, and the result is as fascinating as it is innovative. She foregrounds the sense of loss that passing inflicted, and argues that many of those who were left behind were just as wounded and traumatized as those who departed. By turning safe assumptions inside out, Hobbs questions some of the longest-held ideas about racial identification within American society.”

—Times Higher Education

A Chosen Exile has been featured on NPR’s All Things Considered, Book TV on C-SPAN, The Melissa Harris-Perry Show on MSNBC, The Tavis Smiley Show on Public Radio International, The Madison Show on SiriusXM, and TV News One with Roland Martin. A Chosen Exile has been reviewed in The New York Times Book Review, The San Francisco Chronicle, Harper’s, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Boston Globe. The book was selected as a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice, a Best Book of 2014 by The San Francisco Chronicle, and a Book of the Week by Times Higher Education. The Root named A Chosen Exile one of the Best 15 Nonfiction Books by Black Authors in 2014.

Hobbs gave a TEDx talk at Stanford, and has appeared on C-SPAN, MSNBC, and National Public Radio. Her work has been featured on CNN.com, Slate, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, the BBC World Service, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and The Christian Science Monitor.

Hobbs graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University and earned her PhD with distinction from the University of Chicago. She has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research, and the Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity at Stanford.

Her next book, Far From Sanctuary: African American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights, explores the violence, humiliation, and indignities that African-American motorists experienced on the road during the pre-Civil Rights era. Jim Crow laws and local customs put mid-century American pleasures—taking to the road, exploring the country, enjoying the freedom and the autonomy of driving one’s own car—out of the reach of black drivers. Far From Sanctuary will be published by Harvard University Press in 2019.

Hobbs teaches courses on American identity, African-American history, African-American women’s history, and twentieth-century American history and culture. She has won numerous teaching awards, including the Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Prize, the Graves Award in the Humanities, and the St. Clair Drake Teaching Award. In 2017, she was honored by the Silicon Valley branch of the NAACP with a Freedom Fighter Award.